He looked at a stack of four thousand resumes and decided the whole machine was broken. ModernGuild is what he built instead - a place where students get a coach, a process, and a fair shot.
Adrien Fraise runs ModernGuild on a single, stubborn conviction: a student's first real job should not come down to luck, a polished resume, or whose parent knows whose.
ModernGuild is an online career-mentoring company headquartered on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Its premise is almost old-fashioned. Pair a high school or college student with a dedicated career coach. Walk them through an eight-to-ten week program of career discovery and interview readiness. Measure whether they actually felt prepared. Repeat, at scale, for tens of thousands of young people who would otherwise be a line in a spreadsheet.
Fraise is the CEO and founder, and he has been since January 2011. The company he leads has grown from a barebones platform and a borrowed curriculum into a mentoring marketplace - one stitched together with blinded dashboards, matching algorithms, and predictive analytics designed to take the bias out of who gets seen and who gets hired.
The technology matters, but it is not the point. The point is the human on the other end of the call. ModernGuild's pitch to students is that the journey from classroom to career does not have to be a black box. It can be a transparent process. The frustration of being unseen can be swapped for a personal spotlight. And the often-biased scramble of early-career hiring can be replaced with something closer to a fair shot for all.
Before any of this, Fraise was a strategy consultant. He had the credentials - a BA in Economics and Political Science from Stanford, an MBA from Columbia Business School - and a steady seat at Deloitte, where he climbed from Senior Consultant to Manager between 2007 and 2011.
Somewhere in that work, he kept running into the same broken thing. Recruiting for entry-level roles in finance and consulting was a flood. Thousands of applicants, mountains of resumes, and no honest way to give each candidate a meaningful review. The system was not just inefficient. It was failing the very students it claimed to evaluate.
So he tested the hypothesis. While still on Deloitte's payroll, he launched a 1:1 industry accelerator pilot at Connecticut College - a small experiment built around one idea: train the students properly, and watch what happens. What he found confirmed the hunch. Recruiting was failing them, and badly. The fix was not a better filter. It was a better on-ramp.
ModernGuild went live in January 2011. The materials existed, the curriculum was in place, and the platform was, by his own account, barebones. None of that scared off the students. The first semester pulled in more than 4,000 applications. One hundred participants were accepted across ten campuses. And in a detail that says everything about the appetite for this thing, 200 mentors signed up to guide that first cohort - twice as many mentors as accepted students.
The company evolved from there. A version 2.0 brought real scheduling, better visibility into industry experts, and a sharper focus on community. It expanded to 20 schools. Then came a strategic shift: rather than asking universities to move at their glacial pace, ModernGuild leaned into employer partnerships, piloting with a major bank and later naming partners including Citibank and Wells Fargo. The model matured into one where the company identifies, screens, and trains motivated students - often for free - and delivers workforce-ready, diverse candidates to companies at a fraction of the usual cost.
In 2017, ModernGuild joined the Techstars accelerator. Three months of hundreds of mentoring conversations, a lot of late nights rebuilding the product, and the fundraising that comes with it. By the company's own telling, it now serves more than 20,000 students and a roster of 25-plus client companies.
Ask Fraise what success looks like and he will not lead with enrollment numbers. He has been candid that he never expected ModernGuild to be the biggest player by headcount. What he wanted was leverage - to be, in his words, a change agent showing universities that career preparation belongs at the center of the academic process, not bolted on as an afterthought.
That patience is telling. He knows, and has said plainly, that change at college comes at a glacial pace. He built a company anyway, betting that if he could prove the model with employers and outcomes, the institutions would eventually have to follow. It is the long game played by someone who did the math and decided it was worth the wait.
There is a quieter through-line in all of it. Fraise is a metrics person running a deeply human business. He keeps asking his students the unglamorous questions - did you feel more ready, how did the interview actually go, did you get the second or third round. He treats confidence as a measurable outcome, not a soft skill. For a former consultant, it is a surprisingly tender way to keep score.
There is a real flaw in the higher education system. It is not preparing students enough for life after school.
We will always be asking our students if they feel more prepared to interview - confidence is critical when interviewing.
Change at college comes at a glacial pace.
We want to be a change agent, showing universities that career preparation needs to be a critical part of the academic process.
It is not preparing students enough for life after school with real world tools and experiences.
ModernGuild's first cohort attracted twice as many mentors as accepted students - 200 to 100. People wanted to help.
His measure of success was never headcount. It is whether a student walks into an interview actually feeling ready.
He started building the company on nights and weekends - while still on Deloitte's payroll, testing the idea before betting on it.